Macintosh Consulting

Is AI Going To Take Over the World?

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a blog entry. Guess why? AI. I’ve been studying like crazy the last 6 months trying to catch up. There is so much to know about AI. I don’t consider myself an AI expert. But, I have earned the status of knowing more about AI than most people in most of the rooms I occupy. Here’s what I think you should know about AI. I’m going to apologize in advance, because it’s kind of a rant.

The AI Question

The number one question most people have is if AI is going to take over the world. We’ve all seen it happen in countless stories. Come on, Terminator! And now that AI is here, surely this is what is going to happen, right? Honestly, it’s a hotly debated topic (see the links below). But here’s my take.

First, almost all current news articles written about AI taking over the world are trash. I want to be clear. I think AI could take over the world one day. And quite frankly, if we are stupid enough to let that happen, then we deserve it.

But let me be even clearer, we are not in danger of AI taking over the world any time soon. Why? Assume that AI suddenly took over a bunch of computers. Do you know what you could do? Unplug the computers. What if it took over a data center? Well, someone could just go turn off the power to the building. Or they could cut the internet connection to the building. This isn’t hard. Here’s a story.

Network Outage

One day, some landscapers were digging a hole in a lawn in downtown Salt Lake City. They removed some grass on a parking strip. Suddenly, the entire University of Utah loses internet connectivity. Someone made a boo boo and installed the backup internet fiber connection right next to the main fiber connection. They were supposed to be far apart so that if something happened to one the other would still work. Whoops. Yes, the landscapers cut both main and backup fibers that connected the University of Utah.

Photo by KCRA

Yeah, our infrastructure is kind of fragile, like a soap bubble. Without humans, the whole thing would collapse faster than you can blink. This alone means we are in no danger of an AI take over any time soon.

This is a really simplistic answer. But here’s my point. All of the supposed AI dangers people are talking about are similarly as simplistic. They’re full of holes and assumptions. If you see numbers or percentages, guess what, it’s probably made up. Nobody can really see what the future is going to look like. We don’t know what we don’t know. Maybe that’s why they’re panicking so much. But I think it’s safe to assume that things will progress how they always have. We’re still alive because we figured things out. Most likely we will keep figuring things out.

Why Is There So Much Panic?

You might ask, if there’s no danger, why is everyone talking about it? Smarter people than me are researching this very thing. But I’ll sum up two types of people that I know about who are spreading “AI panic.”

First, you have the mainstream news. It’s July 2023 and if you still believe the mainstream news, well, quit believing it. I don’t believe the news anymore. Where do I get my news? People on the internet that I have researched and I trust. Too many of them have shown evidence that the mainstream news is full out lying. Who picks the mainstream newscasters and journalists? Someone with a lot of money. That’s not exactly an endorsement. That’s a concentration of power.

The second group of people spreading AI panic love to make other people afraid. How can you tell who they are? Their eyes look hungry. Maybe most people don’t analyze how hungry someone’s eyes are. Oh well, I do. Call me weird. I’d link to one of them, but I don’t want to soil my website. Yuck. Just don’t believe yucky people! Don’t even listen to them to see if they have anything good to say because they’re spreading feelings, not thoughts. And it’s disgusting feelings. They think they are smarter than everyone else. Seriously, some of them think they are smarter than Albert Einstein. They might be smarter than you and me, but their inteligence is negated by their lack of emotional control. Ew, just stay away from them. There are plenty of smart people who don’t force their feelings on you, listen to them.

When AI Could Take Over the World

Ok, now that I’ve shown you what I think of the people who are causing so much trouble, let me tell you about the real problem. I do believe AI could take over the world. Here is a description of a world where AI could take over the world.

Humans trust AI more than they trust each other. AI runs the government. It makes the laws. It enforces the laws. We have AI police. We have AI judges. AI delivers punishments. AI operates the machinery that mines raw materials and extracts resources. AI is in charge of energy generation and distribution. AI runs manufacturing and production. AI runs the factories, farms, and transportation. AI runs the hospitals. The doctors are AIs. AI manufactures our medicines. We have AI religion and pastors. People marry AI. And lastly, if this utopian world still has nations that go to war, well, AI controls the soldiers for both nations. Basically AI runs our entire infrastructure and all our institutions.

When the world starts to look like this, then guess what? If AI suddenly decided to kill all humans, it probably wouldn’t even take an hour. Human vs AI war? Pft. Get real.

In fact, this is why nations don’t trust a single actor to be a leader! When you centralize all power then whoever or whatever controls that power can do anything it wants! Some places on the planet have centralized all power. Nobody wants to live in those places. It has never worked out good.

Well, thank heavens our world doesn’t look like this (everywhere) and it wont any time soon. Hopefully, humans won’t ever be dumb enough to turn the world into a “utopia” with a centralized power structure, whether it be an AI or humans at the top. Centralized power is the real issue. It’s not an AI issue.

So, quit worrying about if AI is going to kill us. Right now it’s impossible. AI can’t do anything a hacker can’t! And if AI does kill all humans, the humans would probably be so stupid they wouldn’t even notice.

More info

Don’t just take me word for it.

Debate: Be it resolved, AI research and development poses an existential threat (Youtube Link)
The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con by By Baldur Bjarnason
Talking about a ‘schism’ is ahistorical by Emily M. Bender

Why is my Mac slow?

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Here are the questions I ask when a Mac is slow.

Did you restart yet?
How old is the Mac?
What OS is installed?
How much RAM does it have?
What type of storage does it use, an SSD (solid-state drive) or an HDD (hard disk drive)?
How much free space is on the storage?
What do you typically do on the computer?

When did you last restart?

Computer software has bugs. Over time, bugs can cause problems. Restarting a computer is a good night’s sleep. It is like cleaning the house after a long week.

It used to be much worse, but our computers are better at keeping things clean without a restart. So we can keep them running for weeks without restarting. But if your computer is slow or having problems, you should first try to restart it.

How old and what operating system?

It’s obvious why the age of the computer determines how slow it is. Newer almost always means faster. I say almost because an older, expensive computer is often faster than a new, cheap computer. Besides that exception, newer always means faster.

So hold old is too old? The first three years of a computer are the golden years. After that, it just goes downhill. After six years, if you have the money, it won’t hurt to replace it. If you don’t have the money, you can keep it working for probably up to nine years and still get value from it. But after nine years, you’ll start having all kinds of problems. Unless you’re technical and know how to squeeze the most speed out of a computer, I wouldn’t try to keep using anything older than nine years. Or at least you should keep your expectations low regarding what it can do.

Why do computers get slower? As computers get faster, OS’es do more. That means new computers with new OS’es run at the same relative speed as old computers with their old OS’es. But putting that new OS on an older computer almost always slows the older computer because it’s trying to do more. So updating the OS on an old computer is the same as giving it more and more to do.

A newer OS doesn’t always slow down a computer. Sometimes a newer OS makes one to two-year-old computers run faster. But chances are computers over two years old will get slower. And it just gets worse after that. And eventually, Apple’s new OS’es won’t even run on computers past a certain age, usually seven to ten years old.

You should still update your OS for a lot of reasons. For example, web browsers quit working on older OS’es. It’s a trade-off. You sacrifice speed to talk to other computers.

How much RAM does it have?

In 1956, the psychologist George Miller said that the number of objects an average human can hold in short-term memory is seven plus or minus two. This phrase is the best comparison to RAM that I can know. RAM is the computer’s short-term memory.

RAM is a type of solid-state electronics. We have the term solid-state because electronics used to be vacuum tubes, which were in the gas state. Another type of solid-state memory is a solid-state drive or SSD.

The difference between RAM and an SSD is that RAM is faster than an SSD, but RAM forgets everything when you turn the power off. The SSD does not forget what’s stored on it regardless if there’s power or not. So RAM is volatile memory and an SSD is non-volatile memory. If non-volatile storage was as fast as volatile RAM, we wouldn’t need 2 different types of memory.

Because of the speed difference between RAM and non-volatile storage, the computer copies everything it is going to actively work with into RAM. So when you “open” a file or an application, the computer copies the data from the slower non-volatile storage to the faster volatile RAM. As of 2023, 16GB of RAM is plenty for general computer use. Maybe in 5 years 16GB won’t be enough anymore. Time will tell.

One important thing to know is that you can buy more RAM for some computers, but not all. A lot of people are pretty upset at Apple for making computers with non-upgradable RAM. It’s something to be aware of when you buy a computer. You can specify the amount when you buy it, but after that, you can’t change it.

If you think you need more RAM and your computer’s RAM is upgradable, sometimes this is something that you can do. But sometimes it is pretty involved. We would love to help if this is something you need.

Non-volatile storage, SSD, or HDD?

I compared solid-state drives to RAM. But what’s the difference between SSDs and HHDs? Long story short, computers and operating systems since 2017 must have SSDs, or else they will not only be slow, but they will get slower as you use them. I will explain why.

Hard disk drives, HDDs, have been commercially around for several decades. HDDs have a spinning disk and an arm that sweeps across the disk, kind of like an old record player. The spinning disk is hard, as opposed to the floppy disks in the early years of personal computers, that’s why we call them hard disks.

Today, the disks spin from 5400 RPM to 10,000 RPM. Because the disks are spinning so fast, dropping them when they are spinning could damage them. The moving parts also wear out over time. HDDs are limited in how fast they can read data because they can’t read faster than the disk spins and the read arm rotates.

SSDs don’t have any moving parts. That makes them faster than HDDs by a large margin. There is no competition. The only reason we used HDDs and not SSDs is the cost and capacity.

At first, SSD storage capacity was too small for the main computer storage, but it was enough to transfer data between computers. So the first solid-state storage devices were USB flash drives. Two later products that popularized SSD storage were Apple’s iPod and then iPhones in 2007. In the last 5 years, the prices of SSDs have come down and the storage capacity has increased so that today all new Macs come with SSDs and you can’t even buy HDDs from Apple.

There is one more reason why SSDs are faster than HDDs. In 2017, Apple changed its OS technology that interacts with storage devices to make SDDs even faster but at the cost of making HDDs gradually slower and slower as you use them. Apple decided that HDDs are obsolete, so they didn’t care about crippling them even more. So if you have an HDD, you must replace it with an SDD. We can replace HDDs with SSDs. Let us know if you need this.

One last comment about SSDs and HDDs. SSDs are relatively new for some people and, like myself, they will still refer to these as hard drives. Habits die hard.

How much free space is on the storage?

There is one more issue with storage devices, SSDs, and HDDs. If you fill it up, the OS starts to struggle. The OS is constantly changing files on the drive, mainly logs.

Computers do a lot of things even when just sitting looking like they are doing nothing. Even seasoned computer experts have a hard time knowing what the computer is doing behind the scenes. So application developers wrote code that keeps a log of what the computer is doing so that people can figure out what’s going on if there’s a problem. If there isn’t room to write these log messages, the computer will struggle.

If you ever get in a situation where you run out of hard disk space, the OS will show a warning message when it gets close to running out of space. If you get one of these warnings, you need to stop everything you’re doing and make room on your drive as fast as possible.

First, you need to see how much free space you have. Go to the Finder, either by clicking on the Desktop or by clicking on the Finder icon (the smiling blue face) in the Dock. Click the “Go” menu, select “Computer”, click on your drive, then select the “File” menu and “Get Info”. You should see a list of general information. Find “Capacity”, “Available”, and “Used”. Less than 20% of your capacity is too little. So for a 500GB drive, anything less than 10GB is low.

Next, empty the trash. In Finder, click on the menu named “Finder” in the top left of the screen, then select “Empty Trash”.

Third, quit all of the applications if you can. If an application wants to save a file but can’t because there isn’t space, you need to delete something first. If you don’t know what to delete, check your Downloads folder for old stuff. Put them in the trash, then empty the trash.

I’ll usually restart after quitting all of my applications because restarting will free space used by the system for temporary files. And if you run completely out of space, you must restart because you just don’t know what state your computer is in anymore. It’s not safe to use.

After you restart, you want to delete more stuff. I use GrandPerspective, a great free utility that shows you all the files on your hard disk and their relative size. If you are unsure what to delete, it’s best to contact us for help. There are some things you should not delete, and if you delete them, you could mess up your computer.

What do you typically do on the computer?

Some times are slower than others. If you have a lot of web browser windows open, that can slow down your computer. Close some and it should speed up. If you have every application open on your computer, that will be slow. The reason is that it moves everything from your storage drive into RAM, but then the RAM fills up. When this happens, it uses what’s called virtual memory to store the data. Virtual memory is stored on the drive! That means that you load it from the drive to RAM, but then it is copied out of RAM back to the drive. Just don’t open everything at once.

Creative professionals who create and edit video, images, or audio are the type of people who run into problems maxing out their RAM. Most home users who just look at web pages and read email usually won’t run out of RAM though.

There are other reasons why a computer slows down. Sometimes it slows because of OS bugs. And to be honest, some applications are poorly written and slow. This direction of inquiry pulls back the curtains of the developer community and you start to see how some software developers are ambivalent and apathetic. Sometimes the apathy comes from their managers, and sometimes even up to the CEO. Yes, some companies are known for producing bad software but can sell it because of their marketing and sales departments.

At this point, you need to use a built-in utility called Activity Monitor. This utility gives the user a view of everything going on under the hood of the computer. But it’s pretty complex. Maybe one day we’ll write a blog article about it. But you can also look it up on the web.

Conclusion

Restarting is by far the best tool you have to speed up your computer. But the computer age, OS age, the amount of RAM, and the type and available free space of storage also affect how fast the computer runs. Finally, how you use the computer also impacts how fast the computer runs.

Nowhere in here did I mention the CPU speed because all modern Mac CPUs are fast. Some new Windows computers are slow when you buy them, but not Macs. Ok, I can remember once when Apple sold an entry-level iMac and Mac Mini that were slower than the previous entry-level model. I haven’t seen them do it since. And lastly, you should avoid buying a Mac that was released several years ago. You can check when a Mac was first released in the MacRumors buyer’s guide.

I also haven’t mentioned disk fragmentation. Mac computers automatically fix disk fragmentations so it’s never a problem. Also, on Macs, you rarely need to reinstall the OS to fix problems.

Hopefully, this gives you a good understanding of what affects computer speed and will give you some things to try if your computer is slow. And if you haven’t gotten the hint yet, we would love to help you figure it out if you can’t or don’t have the time or bandwidth to do it yourself.

Should I Buy Cryptocurrency?

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

If you have to ask this question then the answer is a big no.

Do you need to understand Cryptocurrency? The answer is, you guessed it, not really. Well, if you live in or near the Canton of Zug, Switzerland, known as Crypto Valley, then you are an exception.

Here’s what you need to understand.

One day you may need to understand cryptocurrency. That day isn’t today. Money is a social construct, a social contract. Cryptocurrency is basically an attempt to change who is in charge of those contracts. Right now, banks are in charge of money. If you thought it was governments, then why are governments in debt? You probably didn’t even know that banks were in charge of money, they hide this fact well. This is geopolitical power bigger than you can imagine. Changing who is in charge of money will probably take a war or three, or four, or something on that scale. Seriously. Wars are what created this geopolitical structure.

The next thing you need to understand about cryptocurrency is that a lot of people who work with cryptocurrency are drunk with greed. Get involved at your peril. If you’ve drunk the greed juice, go take a cold shower and sober up. Hoping for quick money is gambling and the house always wins. You’re better suffering while you pay off all your debt, build up an emergency fund, pay off your mortgage, and then invest in index or mutual funds (aka a retirement account).

The last thing you need to understand about cryptocurrency is that the technology is pretty cool stuff. But again, the purpose of this technology is to topple bank control over money. Maybe it will happen. I’m not holding my breath. Cryptocurrency technology is cool stuff and may become useful in other ways in our society. But until that happens, stay away from cryptocurrency.

One last thing. I have friends who are involved in cryptocurrency. They aren’t drunk with greed. But they are surrounded by people who are. I wish them the best of luck. What they’re doing is not easy and it is perilous.

Do I Need a VPN?

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It depends. Nobody in my household uses VPN except me. And I can not do my job without VPN. To understand why, you need to understand what VPN is, and why people would use it. This post is going to be more technical than most. Here’s the foundation information you need to know in order to understand VPN.

What is an IP?

All computer devices that talk on the Internet have an IP address. IP is short for Internet Protocol. People usually leave off the “address” part because “IP” isn’t really used in any other context. So if someone says what’s your IP, they mean your IP address.

The IP address is just like a house address. An IP address allows one computer to find another computer. Every IP is different. If 2 devices try to use the same IP address then network communications won’t work right. Usually, the IP is assigned by a DHCP server. In most people’s homes, the DHCP server is part of the router or modem in their home.

IP addresses are assigned to different companies and institutions. Most people and small to medium businesses are not assigned IP addresses. Their intenet service provider (ISP) is assigned IP addresses and they assign them to households or small to medium businesses. Most people have no idea that IP addresses even exist.

Every time your computer sends a message to another computer, it includes the IP address so the other computer knows where to send the reply. It’s like a return address on an envelope. Anyone can look up who has what IP. This means it’s possible to guess the approximate physical location of each computer on the internet based on the location of the company that is assigned the IP.

If you want to see your IP, the location, and the ISP, just visit www.whatismyip.com. That is right, the internet is not anonymous.

What is a Firewall?

The internet is a connection of networks. Each network is like a neighborhood. Computers don’t travel on the internet, it’s messages that travel around. On the internet, most neighborhoods only have one way in or out. A firewall is when that entrance is guarded.

Messages move around the internet freely except when they meet a firewall. Many companies have firewalls between their network and the rest of the internet. Like a guard, the firewall stops each message and inspects and scrutinizes them. Many of those messages are not allowed past the firewall.

What is a VPN?

A VPN is a special entrance into a network. It bypasses the firewall completely. A computer on the outside sends a message to the VPN, and the VPN asks the computer for a username and password. If correct, the messages from the outside computer are then allowed past the VPN without inspecting each message.

But here’s where VPN’s are really special. The messages aren’t just allowed past, they are relayed, just like relay runners pass on a baton. What that means is that once the message is past the VPN, it looks like the message came from the VPN, not an outside computer.

VPN Enables Geolocation Spoofing

A VPN enables all sorts of things. Many VPN companies sell their services not to get past firewalls, but to make it look like the user lives in a different location. So if I connected to a VPN in Germany, all of my network traffic would be relayed through Germany. This would allow me to view the German version of Netflix, for example.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

VPN Enables Privacy

A VPN also creates a layer of privacy. Believe it or not, one of the biggest spies on the internet is your ISP. They watch abd record everything you do on the internet.

When you connect to a VPN, all network messages that leave your computer are encrypted until they reach the VPN. This stops the ISP from seeing what you are doing. All the ISP sees is encrypted network traffic heading towards a VPN.

My old ISP, CenturyLink, would send my web browser to their search engine if I ever typed in an incorrect web address. This was the only time I’ve actually seen an ISP reveal their hand. My current ISP doesn’t do anything to my network traffic and so the only time I think about the ISP is when I pay my bill and delete their marketing emails.

As I said before, nobody in my household is using VPN except me. I only use VPN to get past my employer firewall. I guess I don’t believe enough in privacy to justify spending money on it.

And here’s the thing. If you pay for VPN service to hide your network traffic from your ISP, the VPN service can now see your network traffic. Free VPN services are probably free because they make money exclusively from spying on you! That’s worse than your ISP!

VPN Enables Encryption

ISP’s aren’t the only people who want to see what you are doing on the internet. If you ever use free wifi, like at a coffee shop, anyone on that same network can see your network traffic. If you frequently use free wifi, do not do anything that requires security, like log in to your bank account, unless you use VPN first.

The Answer

Is the VPN service free? No, they are probably malicious.

Do you need to get past your company firewall to work from home? Yes, you need a VPN and your company should provide the service, you shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Do you need to log in to websites or other services while on free wifi? Yes, you need a VPN.

Do you need to use the internet as if you lived in a different location? Yes, you need a VPN, and that VPN has to be located in the desired location.

Do you want to pay money to protect yourself from ISP spying and allow the VPN service to spy on you instead? Yes, you need a VPN.